The book - Alexievich’s last before receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 - portrays the “Homo-Sovieticus” (or Sovok), a pejorative term for the Soviet man and woman, struggling to make sense of their past and present in light of the USSR’s dissolution. They reveal the turmoil, hopes, unbridled capitalism, and widespread disillusionment with the Yeltsin era’s messy privatization and reforms, as well as the rise of Putin-era nationalism. Svetlana Alexievich’s book is made up of hundreds of interviews - “snatches of street noise and kitchen conversations” - taken between 19. Her interlocutors, who experienced the political and economic upheaval of the post-perestroika period, offer an extreme example of how a time of change and liberalism - a period in which society reassesses its central myths - can usher in a new search for past ideals of “greatness.” Svetlana Alexievich’s 2013 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, now available in Bela Shayevich’s wonderfully readable English translation, offers sobering insights into the lives of ordinary Russians over the course of the last quarter century. Whatever lies ahead, the United States may be entering an era when we will need to learn from Russia’s struggle with the rhetoric of greatness, while acknowledging our tendency toward the same ideological impasse.
Time will tell what will emerge from the relationship between the two presidents: mutual admiration, fierce rivalry, or some other unforeseeable major shift in global power. And in terms of ideology, it is hard not to observe parallels between the romantic idea of national “Greatness” that bolstered the isolationist principles of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, and the “Make America Great Again” slogan employed by the successful Trump campaign.
After all, Donald Trump has openly heaped lavish praise on President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, and has insinuated that a Trump administration could support Russian foreign policy. THE OUTCOME of the November 8 American presidential election suggests the United States may be drifting in curious ways toward Russia.
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